Benchmarking

What is benchmarking?
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Benchmarking is the process of comparing your school’s spending with similar schools and schools with similar challenges. It allows your school to look at spend in different areas such as staffing, supplies and services; buildings and land; as well as against the individual Consistent Financial Reporting (CFR) codes. It helps you inform your school development process.

Benchmarking helps you to consider how to use your resources to support high-quality teaching and the best education outcomes for your pupils.

Benchmarking helps you to connect with other schools to discuss challenges and successes. This can help you consider whether:

  • your resource allocations are working for you
  • you can improve outcomes by doing things differently.

Benchmarking is only a guide. Some schools may find themselves at the lower or upper extremes of the data. You should consider local knowledge about your school when assessing the data.

Kent benchmarking
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Kent benchmarking is a one page summary showing an individual school's data compared to just Kent schools of a similar size and type.

Kent benchmarking for 2023-24 is being worked on and will be available shortly

DfE Benchmarking
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The DfE benchmarking enables comparison with schools nationally and has the facility to focus on specific areas of activity. It also allows the selection of specific types of schools for the comparison sample.

The Schools Financial Benchmarking website has been updated by removing the requirement for usernames and passwords to access the website. The data on the website remains for maintained schools only. The website works in the same way as before and to access the site please take the following steps:

  • Visit the Schools Financial Benchmarking website
  • Select the login button
  • On the new page enter the school’s 3-digit Local Authority number
  • Then enter the 4-digit establishment number in the next box
  • Then choose ‘select’.